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Tuesday, August 30, 2016

In the first post on neighborhoods, I talked about the guidelines I used for defining neighborhoods. One thing I found helpful for setting the neighborhoods was this map of the 30 parishes in Orléans.

By comparing the borders with the 1648 city plan, I could use the parish borders for some areas. For example, the neighborhood I called the North Side predominantly consists of the parish of St. Paterne along with portions of the adjacent two parishes and a section cut out from the middle of Saint-Pierre-Encentelée for the Place Martroy. In the eastern part of the city, the Abbeys is Sainte-Euverte+Saint Victor+Saint-Aignan.

Monday, August 29, 2016

In yesterday's post I discussed the process of creating neighborhoods for the city of Orléans. Here's a revised version of the neighborhoods of Orléans. I think the colors are easier to distinguish in this version and I included the bridge in the Les Tournelles neighborhood. I also added in two suburb neighborhoods: the Mottes (the island in the middle of the Loire beneath the middle of the bridge) and the Fauxbourg Saint Vincent. The eastern motte looks like an orchard so I decided that the open country chart from Flashing Blades would be useful. It also would be useful for the suburb of Saint Vincent north of the city.

I'll follow up with another post that adds in travel times, shortcuts, finding addresses, and getting lost and unlost. Until then, here are the Encounter charts for the two suburban neighborhoods.

Sunday, August 28, 2016

Why Orléans?

Richelieu has heard rumors of unrest in the army against the King and even that someone has been trying to suborn members of the elite Swiss Guard. Some of the PCs are sent to Orléans to investigate some of those rumors. Another PC decided, after an encounter with a fiendish torture device wielded by a mad villain, that the air in Paris right now is unhealthy for him. Thus a sudden and unannouced trip to Orléans seemed just the thing for him. As a result I've been spending a lot of time researching Orléans in the early 17th century. None of the PCs are from Orléans and we haven't had any adventures set there before this, so I haven't done anything with Orléans prior to this set of adventures.

Now for some cities (like Paris) and provinces I've been able to use information from Black "call me Mike" Vulmea's Obsidian Portal site for his Le Ballet de l'Acier campaign. But nothing is available on the province of Orleannais or the city of Orléan. Mike may have information, but it isn't publicly available. So I've had to do my own research. Since the city is new for the PCs, one thing I wanted to do was facilitate a process of exploring the city for the players (more on that later).

Maps of Orléans

I found two very useful maps of the city. The first is an 1849 facsimile reprint of the 1648 Plan et profil au naturel de la ville d'Orleans by Giles Hotot. It is available in zoomable versions from Digital Commonwealth, here or from the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library, here. The second map, from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, is the Plan de la ville d'Orléans, an engraving by Charles Inselin dating from 1700. Which makes it anachronistic, but it has street, plaza, and building names written out. So I use it to confirm the locations for places that are difficult to decipher from the first map and to fill in gaps. It too is zoomable.

What's Old is New Again

Notion towards getting cities right:
Neighborhoods in fantasy RPG cities are best treated as terrain. Let the
players see the map, do it up tourist map style with some key neighborhoods
indicated along with key features/goals and let the players see it, even
present it like a hex map board game.

Each neighborhood can have a movement rate, a chance to get lost, a random
occurrence or two, maybe a chance to catch disease by eating iffy street food
and meat pies from alley shops, taverns where you get drunk and lose movement
points could be treated like traps as could harlots. Maybe the placement of
city guards checkpoints is relevant and the players will be trying to dodge
those so they can move about with all their armor and double-sized magic
swords.

Cities and respectably sized towns are big and a DM is going to go crazy and
waste a lot of time tryign to detail it in the same manner (even in passing) as
a dungeon. The difficulty and hazards of Fisher's Row and Slopside can server as a swamp and mountain hexes do in
wilderness travel. Keep it big, treat it big and you don't have to sweat the
small stuff ; no one ever tries to map every tree in a forest, the sames sort
of treatment can apply to buildings in a city if they are not important
features.

Not long afterwards while checking out some of the Collected Information on the Wicked City blog, I came across a series of random encounter tables (here's one for The Rubble) for the Wicked City .

Now creating custom encounter tables by area and organizing cities into neighborhoods isn't a brand new idea, though I think it is a good idea. Custom encounter tables are in the original 1974 D&D rules and using neighborhoods dates back to sometime in the 1970s
or early 1980s. But sometimes I need a reminder (or two) to dust something off
and reuse it. This was just the pair of reminders I needed.

I've used neighborhood or area maps for cities before, mostly in Sci Fi settings like Traveller and Star Wars. And it has worked well in the past for giving the players enough information so that the city isn't a big blank without giving them so much information that they are drowning in details. So I decided to create neighborhoods for Orléans. To do that, I decided to divide the 1648 map into neighborhoods.

Create a simplified node and path map showing the neighborhoods as polygons and the connections between neighborhoods.

The Neighborhoods

It took a few tries before I had something that seemed to cover the city using my guidelines. Here's what I came up with.

As you can see, there are 12 neighborhoods. I'll need to add a few more for the suburbs, but best to keep things more simple for now. I used more colors than I needed. There is a way to color it with only 4 colors. But I like colors and frankly, it's been a century since I've done math theorems and working out a 4-coloring was way too much trouble just to be minimalist.

Next I named the neighborhoods. Here I didn't try to be historically accurate, though I did name some neighborhoods based on locations that probably could and possibly would have been neighborhoods in reality. So some neighborhoods have simple names like North Side and West Side based on simple map geography, some are named for landmarks like Place du Martroy or Les Halles, and others are named by function like Dock Side and The Abbeys. Here's all twelve.

█ North Side: residential.

█ Place du
Martroy: this is a big city center type of square so a mix of market and residential.

█ West Side: residential.(It actually also has a market, but a solution I used to another problem nicely handles this as well.)

█ Old Marke: market and residential.

█ Dock Side: stuff you would find at the docks. This area had a custom table all its own.

█ Les
Tournelles: this is the city's one bridge across the Loire and the gate is probably the busiest in the city, so this used a table called, gate.

█ Les Halle: residential, market, gate, and a new table for the ducal castle.Having a separate table for the castle will be helpful as at some point the PCs are going to need to be around the man who is both a Duke (duc) and the Provincial Governor (governeur).

█ Place
L’Estape:this is a noble neighborhood, mostly these are robe nobles and wealthy merchants, but I needed at least one neighborhood for nobles. This ares has a lot of big shot 16th and 17th century mansions that still exist today.

█ Maison de
Ville: residential, marketplace, and the area for city government functions. I created a custom table that blended the short table of tables with the custom single table like Dock Side.

█ Saint Croix: I created a modified version of the Church table in Flashing Blades to use.

█ The University: a special University table and residential.

█ The Abbeys: named for the two big abbeys, this has residential, university, and it includes much of the length of the Grand Rue de Bourgogne which is one of the cities main transportation arteries and a location with a lot of businesses and shops, plus, of course, the abbeys. Here I used marketplace, residential, university, church (there are quite a few other churches here), and 10 entries chosen for the abbeys.

Next, I needed to do some work for each neighborhood. My guidelines here were the following.

Determine an average time to traverse the neighborhood.

Travel or traversal time should be modified by local knowledge (even city residentes will not be familiar with every neighborhood), mode of travel, social rank so determine a table of modifiers.

Determine chance for becoming lost. Same modifiers apply as above.

For each Neighborhood list the important locations, include focal points and geographical boundaries.

Determine presence of any major Factions.

List secondary locations, include any named NPC residents, any known taverns, inns, shops, mansions, etc.

Create a unique encounter table(s) that includes typical inhabitants or travelers as well as typical events for the Neighborhood. Many neighborhoods should have different tables for Daytime and Nighttime. On the encounter tables include a special result that ties to a table for named NPCs who live or work in that Neighborhood.

I decided to do the last bullet first. I started with the encounter tables from Flashing Blades which include encounters with the King or Queen, Cardinals, and Dukes. Clearly the tables are for Paris not your local village. So the first thing I did was prune the tables for people too regal to be normally wandering about Orleans. Then I added in details like the name of the current governor and bishop of the diocese of Orleans. I knew that research would come in handy eventually.

One problem I encountered was that dividing the city into even as many as 12 neighborhoods meant that most neighborhoods were a mix of economic levels, types of activities, landmarks, etc. I managed this, by creating a small table for most neighborhoods that then referred to 2 or more of a set of common tables such as Encounters at a Marketplace. Another thing I wanted was for there to be some blending between neighborhoods. So for most neighborhoods I included entries for encounters using tables for the adjacent or neighboring neighborhoods.

This also solved an earlier issue for West Side - how to include markets. Since the adjacent neighborhoods are marketplace areas, by including an entry to roll on those tables, West Side has a chance for Encounters at a Marketplace.

Here's what the complete set of tables look like. (Apologies for the wacky font and alignment. I brought this in from MS-Word using the create a blog feature and some copy paste. Apparently I still don't understand Blogger.)